Part 4 · Chapter 14

אמנם however, אחר קבלתו, after he receives from the teacher, אדרבה, the opposite, מזה הצמצום שהיה בבחינת נקודה, הוא שנמשך הימנו כל השפעה והתפשטות וזולתו וכו'. This very צמצום, this very fact that he was so focused and wouldn't talk to anybody in class and wouldn't even think for himself about what he's being told. When you're listening to a teacher, you're not supposed to think about what he's saying, you're just supposed to absorb it.

Absorbing the Teacher’s Words Without Immediate Analysis 0:21

Not supposed to try to figure out how it fits with other things and like interpret it and you're just trying you just want to take it in in its pure state and just retain the facts, and as he says it, and afterwards you'll try to sort it out and see how it fits together with other things, and you know what I mean? Like somebody is telling you a story, you just want to be picturing the story and following, you know.

That's the best way to learn. Afterwards you think about it and interpret it and work on it on your own. When a person learns like that, then afterwards they're a very good teacher and they're able to really explain it over to somebody else well.

It does really stick with you if you listen. כמו שנתבאר במקום אחר, as explained elsewhere. ומכל זה יובן, from all this understood, שהקו הנמשך מן הנקודה הוא רק מבחינת התפשטות מן ההיולי העצמי. It's understood that the line that comes out from the point, that relationship is like the spreading out from a היולי. That then the נקודה stays hidden, but that doesn't stop the revelation. On the contrary, that's the source of the revelation.

The same thing, the the רשימו is true to נקודה, and it's higher than ever being revealed, it's never totally revealed. But it's not totally It's never totally revealed because it's infinite, and it can reveal anything.

And the קו is only revealing one השתלשלות. Nevertheless, the רשימו is the source of the קו, and everything that's in the השתלשלות is coming out from the רשימו through the קו.

Yet, the whole רשימו is not revealed ever. But the fact that the whole רשימו is not revealed is not that it stops things from being revealed from it, you can reveal anything you want from it. Any you know, just that it's not going to be totally revealed because it is essentially it's a היולי that and it's impossible to reveal the whole thing cuz it's I mean, God could do it, but you know, you can't do it like one line at a time really, because it is infinite, and so it's never fully revealed, cuz it's too big of a zero.

Like you know, they say the guy, you know, is just saying, "I'm a nothing, I'm a nothing," and a guy, "Look who thinks he's a nothing.

I'm a bigger nothing." You know, you know what I mean? So the רשימו is a nothing, but it's a bigger nothing than our whole world.

Why the Revealed Line Is Considered Short 2:34

Now we're going to explain another point, you know, a new paragraph. אמנם, however, מה שנמשך בבחינת קו קצר,

why is the קו revealed in a way of like a short line? What does that mean that it's a short line? הנה מבואר במקום אחר, it's explained elsewhere, שכשם שהנקודה בבחינת היולי לגבי הקו, just like the point of the רשימו is a היולי compared to the קו, כך הקו בבחינת היולי לבחינת אורך ורוחב דשטח.

So too, a line is a היולי for a length and a width. So just like a bunch of points you put them together you make a line, if you take a bunch of lines you put them together and you can draw all kinds of different neat little shapes.

But the line, though, is the basic building block, and the same line you could use to draw in any shape, it's just you're taking the same line and doing it over and over again in different ways. The same thing like the point The line is just the same point being done over and over again in different ways.

Right, so the line is kind of like a point in the big picture, right. The only difference that a line What's the difference between a line and a point?

Point vs. Line: The Role of Direction 3:36

The difference between a line and a point is that in a point, there's no context whatsoever. There's no dimensions, there's no up, there's no You don't know what it is. You don't know whether it's up or down, or this side, right, left, you don't know, it's just there. You don't have any context. A line, you see a direction already. You see that there that it's going a certain way.

So it already has the idea of an up and a down, that it's going in a certain direction already. Right, so it has the idea of direction.

You don't know which way it's pointing cuz maybe the paper could be turned different ways, or whatever, but you know that it's already you already see an idea of direction.

You see a polar thing, that those are all going opposite ways. There's already an essential difference between that and a point, and that's what we're going to say, that the whole ענין of the line is to make an up and down. That's why the kabbalists they made an analogy of the קו to a line. It's not really a line. It's that, you know, they're using a משל of a line because of this this relationship of like a point and a line, you know.

It's not like the upstairs is lines and points and, you know, God's like drawing with a, you know, compass and a pencil, you know what I mean? Like or like It's not like that. It's not like physical light either that's like coming down in a line, you know. It's not It's not It's not a physical thing at all, it's a משל.

Everything eventually has to be translated into like something that we know, like how that is in us, because you know, it's too So, but this is like a בבחינת אורך ורוחב, שהתכלית, ידוע, it's known, שהקו, the line, הגם שהוא בא בבחינת המשכה והתפשטות מלמעלה למטה, even though a line is already spreading out from up to down, it's already drawn out, אבל אין ענין פרטיות אופן המשכה המשכה כלל.

It's not a particular way of המשכה, רק מה שנמשך האור מלמעלה למטה בלבד, it's just the idea of light of going from up to down. What does that mean? That means, like, let's say the teacher takes the point of math that he wrote up on the board, and then like we said before, he breaks it up into arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, right? And then he takes each of those, and he breaks up arithmetic into addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Breaking Down Math: From Point to Hierarchical Line 5:51

He keeps breaking it up. That breaking up of the idea, the point of math, into like a hierarchy of like more basic ideas, you know, like now my wife's going to teach today, she's starting to teach math and and ABCs to the little kids at the חדר here, right?

So she's going to teach them how to add and stuff. So she's you start from the beginning. You start from adding like five and eight, you know, or or even before that. I don't even know what they're doing. I think they're just like counting things and knowing what number it is. So they just like have like picture of like five oranges, and they have to, you know, circle like underneath it says like four, five, six, and you have to circle whether it's four, five, or six.

They have to learn how to, you know, count. That's like the basic thing. And then and then and then they're going to learn how to add, where they have one fishy and one fishy and that equals two fishies. So those are the basic things, and then later is the more advanced things. So so there's like already a whole hierarchy of an up and down. That's the idea of a line that was broken up from a point into a line.

But that line is still not a particular explanation of any of those subjects. It's just breaking up math into a way so that you could evaluate what level person's on, so you know which subject to teach them, which grade they're in. You know, the fact that the grades are divided up by subjects, and like if there's a class plan for each year, that just lets you know what to teach.

So you say, okay, so if you're here on the line, now we're going to talk about this part of math. That just helps you know what to teach, but it's not an actual explanation of anything yet. So the actual explanation is like the שטח that comes out after the from from the line. But first you have to break the point up into a line, because to somebody that really knows math, arithmetic is not really more basic than calculus.

They're all the same. But in order to make it simple, so you decide this is going to be the beginning, this is going to be the end, and you make it like an order, and you start from a certain place. And then you know, the same thing like it says about חסידות, so חסידות is really in the way of עיגולים, that there's no beginning or end, it's all really one point.

Learning Chassidus Through the Linear Sha’ar Yichud 7:57

So how can you explain it? You can't really explain, you have to get it. But nevertheless, it has to be learned in an orderly way, and the עצה, the first thing to learn is the סדר השתלשלות, the way it's explained in שער היחוד. That's what it says in the in a letter from the פריערדיקער רבי. He quotes the רבי רש״ב in the name of the מהר״ש. So it's a tradition of the חב״ד רביים that even though חסידות really has no beginning and no end, and so it seems like it's impossible to ever start, how are you ever supposed to start jump in and start understanding it, say, oh, there's a there's a way in, and that is the only ספר that's written in a line, which is שער היחוד.

It goes from straight, from up to down. All the other books don't come from up to down. They're just somewhere in the middle, and you're floating. This point floating in middle of nowhere, you have no context to figure out what they're talking about.

And there's one ספר which is made in the way of a line, and that's that's where you're supposed to start from. So the real כוונה is to learn the other ספרים and to get the עצם and like But in order to get it, you first have to do this line, and learn the סדר השתלשלות like this, from up to down. That's the whole thing. שעל ידי זה נמצא בבחינת מעלה ומטה מן המשפיע למקבל.

This creates the idea of up and down from the משפיע to the מקבל, which is the idea that there's the teacher, which is the top, and the student is the bottom, and then you have to make a ladder in between them, that first you have to learn this, and then you'll learn this, and then as you grow, you get closer and closer until you graduate, and they give you a diploma, and they say now you can be a teacher.

So they make a line from up to down like that. That's just the idea of the קו, is just making the the system of measurement. מה שאין כן בהיולי דנקודה, but in the היולי of the point, even though the line is also היולי, but the line at least has an up and down. So now it it's like with this system, it's a היולי for any class plan that you can, you know, in any different class you're going to teach, and any day in the class, you'll know what to teach based on where they are within that subject.

You'll know what we're going to teach today, and what we're going to teach tomorrow, right? As soon as we learn this, we'll learn that, then we'll learn that. It could come out infinite ways, depending where they're up to.

And each of those things could be explained in different ways, different examples, like once you're going when you're making it go off to a width, for each teacher could explain that thing in a different way, and the class could go differently. But the line is the same, it just stays the same.

But that at least has an up and down. In other words, all classes and all teachers, even if, you know, even though it's never the same, no two years is the same, even the same teacher, and for sure two different teachers teaching the same thing, nevertheless, everybody goes through the same hierarchy of subjects: they learn addition, then they learn subtraction, then they learn multiplication, then they learn division.

Then they learn algebra, then they learn geometry, then they learn trigonometry, then they learn calculus. It's always the same order. Each thing could be brought out in different ways, which is like a width, but the basic line of how you climb the ladder of math is really the same. I, I mean I'm not saying it has to be done totally that way, but let's, you know, let's say there's a standard, which there pretty much is.

So you could keep that the same and nevertheless you could have infinite different ways that it comes out while keeping that same line. And you could change the point also, you could go to science class and now the whole point is different. Instead of writing up on the board math, he writes up on the board science and it's a different class. And then that has its own line.

But the difference is that then in the line, there's at least you know which grade you're in. You know which class to go in, and you know if you're behind the class, they already, let's say you come in the middle of the year, you're behind the class, they're already farther up on the line. You know where you're supposed to go, there's an up and down.

The Point’s Lack of Up‑Down Makes Teaching Hard 11:15

When it comes to a point, בהיולי דנקודה אין בו מעלה ומטה ראש תוך וסוף כו' כידוע, there's no up, down, beginning, middle, or end. So you walk in and you say, listen guys, math, you just got to get it. Either you got it or you don't. I got it and you don't, there's nothing you could do about it. So you can't teach it, cuz it's an all or nothing thing, you know?

How am I supposed to teach something like that? The real point can't be, so they're, therefore, at that level, it's not even something that you can like discuss teaching to somebody else. Once you're talking about a line, you didn't actually teach somebody, but you're already like discussing the idea, you're, you already thought about a student. That's the whole point of the קו, is that you didn't actually teach yet, but you thought there's going to be a student, and I'm going to have to bring it down.

And you're ready to bring it down to any student. You didn't bring out to a particular student, you're already ready to bring it out to any student. You have your system of how to figure out what to teach ready. In the point, you're not ready to bring it out to anybody yet, because in order to bring it out, you have to to to do this whole process of צמצום to make it teachable.

Because the way that you have it, you say, I just got it, I know it. It's all one point by me, I have the whole thing, and I can't express it to you. It's just is, you know? You just do it. How do you add? You do it, come on. Everybody knows that, I just do it.

Purpose of the Line According to the Etz Chaim 12:41

You can't tell that to a kid though, they won't get it. וזהו מה שכתוב בעץ חיים, this is what it says in עץ חיים, דכל עיקר הארת הקו אינו רק להיות בחינת מעלה ומטה כמו שיתבאר. The whole purpose of the line is to create the idea of up and down.